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Antiword is a GPLd, multiplatform labor of love by Adri van Os, with assistance from others in porting and making it available on RISC OS, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS/X, Amiga, VMS, NetWare, Plan 9, Epic, Zaurus, DOS, and Windows. Those in addition to Linux/Unix, of course. Antiword is still in beta, but I found it completely usable as it is. The current release on Debian is 0.35.1.

Building and installing Antiword from developer source is not difficult, but it is a little different than normal. If you can't find the right binary for your distribution, download the latest source tarball from the site. Version 0.36.1 is the release I grabbed. After decompressing the tarball, enter the subdirectory created by tar and type make, then make install as a normal user. There are many platform specific Makefiles included in the tarball, but the default in our download is for Linux. By the way, the make install process creates a bin directory in your home directory, and puts the executable there.

No man pages are included with the developer release, but simply entering antiword without any arguments produces a handy little cheat sheet explaining how to use it. Like this one:

Name: antiword
Purpose: Display MS-Word files
Author: (C) 1998-2004 Adri van Os
Version: 0.36.1  (09 Dec 2004)
Status: GNU General Public License
Usage: antiword [switches] wordfile1 [wordfile2 ...]
Switches: [-f|-t|-a papersize|-p papersize|-x dtd][-m mapping][-w #][-i #][-Ls]
        -f formatted text output
        -t text output (default)
        -a <paper size name> Adobe PDF output
        -p <paper size name> PostScript output
            paper size like: a4, letter or legal
        -x <dtd> XML output
            like: db (DocBook)
        -m <mapping> character mapping file
        -w <width> in characters of text output
        -i <level> image level (PostScript only)
        -L use landscape mode (PostScript only)
        -s Show hidden (by Word) text

As you can see, we can various options for the conversion. We can create a straight text file, PDF, PostScript, or XML. That's a pretty impressive range of options for a beta. But how well does it work, that's the real question. Let's give it a whirl with some real world documents.

I downloaded an MS Word 6 document from the Oracle web site. The first test was to convert to plain text, like this:

antiword -t Linux_DB.doc > LDB.txt

Paging through the resulting text document, I noticed that the graphics were missing, but other than that, the text was well formatted and perfectly legible. Then I tried the PDF and PostScript options (using antiword -a letter Linux_DB.doc > LDB.pdf and antiword -p letter Linux_DB.doc > LDB.ps respectively). Again, the images were missing, but other than that, the conversions seemed to have worked perfectly.

Click to enlarge

I decided to tinker with the -i option for PostScript conversions, and sure enough, using -i2 faithfully reproduced the images from the original as well as the text. You can see screenshot of the PostScript data viewed with GhostView alongside.

Other attempts on other MS Word documents did not always result in the images being included in the conversion. Possibly they were created with earlier versions of MS Word, as the image feature is only supposed to work on documents created by MS Word 6 and later.

One last option to mention. The -s argument tells Antiword to show any comments hidden by MS Word in the original document. There have been a number of embarrassing slips by various firms who have found out to late that these "hidden" comments can be brought back to visibility by people who were never intended to see them.

Antiword is a valuable tool when you want to see, or to print, an MS Word document quickly, without waiting for a huge word processing app to load itself into memory. It's not quite soup in some ways, but I'm going to keep eye on it. When it can handle PDFs and images without a hitch, it's good to go as far as I'm concerned.

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